Thought police muscle up in Britain
Hal G. P. Colebatch | April 21, 2009
Article from: The Australian
BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian
state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international
law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.

There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought
police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff
out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.

Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution’s principal
tasks was “to alter people’s actual psychology”. Britain is not
Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people’s psychology and create a
new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.

The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise
politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven
years’ prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech
amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was
Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and
suggested the “global baggage of empire” was linked to soccer violence
by “racist and xenophobic white males”. He claimed the English
“propensity for violence” was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and
Wales, and that the English as a race were “potentially very
aggressive”.

In the past 10 years I have collected reports of many instances of
draconian punishments, including the arrest and criminal prosecution
of children, for thought-crimes and offences against political
correctness.

Countryside Restoration Trust chairman and columnist Robin Page said
at a rally against the Government’s anti-hunting laws in
Gloucestershire in 2002: “If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-
seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as
you.” Page was arrested, and after four months he received a letter
saying no charges would be pressed, but that: “If further evidence
comes to our attention whereby your involvement is implicated, we will
seek to initiate proceedings.” It took him five years to clear his name.

Page was at least an adult. In September 2006, a 14-year-old
schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another
group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only
Urdu. The teacher’s first response, according to Stott, was to scream
at her: “It’s racist, you’re going to get done by the police!” Upset
and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher
called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom
had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police
station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed. According to
her mother, she was placed in a bare cell for 3 1/2 hours. She was
questioned on suspicion of committing a racial public order offence
and then released without charge. The school was said to be
investigating what further action to take, not against the teacher,
but against Stott. Headmaster Anthony Edkins reportedly said: “An
allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially
motivated remark. We aim to ensure a caring and tolerant attitude
towards pupils of all ethnic backgrounds and will not stand for racism
in any form.”

A 10-year-old child was arrested and brought before a judge, for
having allegedly called an 11-year-old boya “Paki” and “bin Laden”
during a playground argument at a primary school (the other boy had
called him a skunk and a Teletubby). When it reached the court the
case had cost taxpayers pound stg. 25,000. The accused was so
distressed that he had stopped attending school. The judge, Jonathan
Finestein, said: “Have we really got to the stage where we are
prosecuting 10-year-old boys because of political correctness? There
are major crimes out there and the police don’t bother to prosecute.
This is nonsense.”

Finestein was fiercely attacked by teaching union leaders, as in those
witch-hunt trials where any who spoke in defence of an accused or
pointed to defects in the prosecution were immediately targeted as
witches and candidates for burning.

Hate-crime police investigated Basil Brush, a puppet fox on children’s
television, who had made a joke about Gypsies. The BBC confessed that
Brush had behaved inappropriately and assured police that the episode
would be banned.

A bishop was warned by the police for not having done enough to
“celebrate diversity”, the enforcing of which is now apparently a
police function. A Christian home for retired clergy and religious
workers lost a grant because it would not reveal to official snoopers
how many of the residents were homosexual. That they had never been
asked was taken as evidence of homophobia.

Muslim parents who objected to young children being given books
advocating same-sex marriage and adoption at one school last year had
their wishes respected and the offending material withdrawn. This
year, Muslim and Christian parents at another school objecting to the
same material have not only had their objections ignored but have been
threatened with prosecution if they withdraw their children.

There have been innumerable cases in recent months of people in
schools, hospitals and other institutions losing their jobs because of
various religious scruples, often, as in the East Germany of yore, not
shouted fanatically from the rooftops but betrayed in private
conversations and reported to authorities. The crime of one nurse was
to offer to pray for a patient, who did not complain but merely
mentioned the matter to another nurse. A primary school receptionist,
Jennie Cain, whose five-year-old daughter was told off for talking
about Jesus in class, faces the sack for seeking support from her
church. A private email from her to other members of the church asking
for prayers fell into the hands of school authorities.

Permissiveness as well as draconianism can be deployed to destroy
socially accepted norms and values. The Royal Navy, for instance, has
installed a satanist chapel in a warship to accommodate the
proclivities of a satanist crew member. “What would Nelson have said?”
is a British newspaper cliche about navy scandals, but in this case
seems a legitimate question. Satanist paraphernalia is also supplied
to prison inmates who need it.

This campaign seems to come from unelected or quasi-governmental
bodies controlling various institutions, which are more or less
unanswerable to electors, more than it does directly from the
Government, although the Government helps drive it and condones it in
a fudged and deniable manner.

Any one of these incidents might be dismissed as an aberration, but
taken together – and I have only mentioned a tiny sample; more are
reported almost every day – they add up to a pretty clear picture.

Hal G. P. Colebatch’s Blair’s Britain was chosen as a book of the year
by The Spectator in 1999.

He had always been an involuntary factory owner. Without agreeing to tend his German father’s business interests in Manchester he would have lacked the income for himself and Marx to live in the comfort they took as their right. The profligate Marx was constantly on the edge of penury. Engels counted his pennies (or rather his tens of thousands of pounds) more carefully but did not stint in his pleasures. He rode out regularly with the prestigious and costly Cheshire Hounds. He drank wine of quality and ­Pilsner beer in quantity. He treated himself to bevies of young women, including prostitutes. He dressed in fashion.

Engels kept up bourgeois appearances by holding his capitalist and communist lives separate. The frock-coated German industrialist bought a second home in Manchester where he installed his fiery Irish mistress Mary Burns and welcomed his socialist comrades. Mary’s sister Lizzy took her place as his lover when she died. Northern industrialists knew he was a “red” but Engels was discreet about his political and sexual activity and avoided social ostracism. After 1869, when the Ermen brothers bought him out of the business, he moved to London and continued to flourish handsomely through judicious ­investments. He was one of those coupon- ­snipping rentiers that he and Marx subjected to withering contempt in their pamphlets.

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Their outlook, being rooted in socio-­economic determinism and philosophical amoralism, inured them to pangs of conscience about the creators of their comfort: the hundreds of Mancunian workers toiling for miserable wages in Engels’s factory that made its patented “Diamond Thread”. Marxism’s co-founders believed that the greater good of humanity was served while they had optimal leisure to elaborate their “correct” theory of communism. Engels was not just a monetary provider for the Marxist cause. Letters ­written between Marx and Engels point to a dynamic partnership, and Hunt defends Engels against the modern charge that he distorted the essence of Marx’s doctrines. Marx always submitted drafts of books such as Das Kapital, which appeared with Marx as sole author, for improvement. When Engels tried to codify Marxism after Marx’s death in 1883, he was only making up for what his chronically indecisive partner sho­uld have done for himself.

Both had always been eager to encourage a broad revolutionary movement against capitalism through­out Europe. But they were ­notorious sectarians, better at squabbling and intriguing than at building organisations. The secrecy of the­ir tiny International Working Men’s Association fooled Europe’s police chiefs into overestimating its practical influence. Marxism was a weak political force until the 1890s, when German socialism gathered mass support and cheered the ageing Engels by adopting Marxist ideology.

Hunt has tested and proved the hypothesis that it is possible to write about Engels without putting the English language through the mangle. In examining the linkages between doctrine, politics and private personality, he argues, moreover, that we should not judge him by anachronistic ­standards. Engels was a man of his times and a lot of his comments on women, homosexuals, Slavs and non-European races would now be thought objectionable. Perhaps, though, the author could have given us a little more on the question of Engels’s ­responsibility for the later oppression in the USSR. Engels did not advocate the establishment of a dictatorial elite to inaugurate the perfect society. But several cardinal features of his thought (amoralism, anti-peasantism, state centralism and pseudo-scientific confidence) were bricks in the pyramid of the ­Soviet order. This is not to deny that if ­Engels, who died in 1895, had lived in Russia after 1917 he would hardly have been likely to escape arrest as a free-thinking communist dissenter.

Hunt has a mastery of 19th-century British culture and European political thought. The partner who willingly played “second fiddle” to capitalism’s Jeremiah receives his due.

The Frock-Coated Communist by Tristram Hunt
Allen Lane £25 pp464

We reach the end of our eonic sequence, as our model forces a distinction of the early modern and the new period at the end of this transition as the new system comes into play. The rough year 1848 is useful, for we can see that this is the first point at which one could begin to clearly perceive the eonic effect. And who do we find here but Marx and Engels generating either a revised liberalism, or else a ‘general TP4 exception’? Our discrete freedom sequence seems to end up an indiscrete Whiggocracy and to have some unfinished business. Not surprising. Whenever there is a Leveller a True Leveller can’t be far behind.[i]

Although the year 1848 is no more than a rough marker chosen as a peg to hang a tale, and end a book, it neatly shows the point at which our pattern starts into its post-transition, and reversal from localization to globalization, unprotected by any factor of eonic determination from imperialistic degenerations and the new economic systems, soon to be downshifted further by Darwinian ideology. Even a cursory glance at modern philosophy shows how the seminal era slumps out after the generation of Marx and Schopenhauer. Many other indicators make the point. This time, seeing the effect, we can take action to recover. We tend to be mesmerized by the ignited exponential processes (e.g. the demographic transition) beginning in the transition, but these are not the same. We must stick to the rules of our model, which suggests the intermittency of our transitions, which puts us outside of the eonic sequence. That will at least enforce a discipline of teleological disarmament of all parties.

1848: Teleological antinomies We can easily spot the crude division point predicted by the model at about the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions, at the outside by 1848, a truly spectacular generation in world history. This division is useful because it is about the exact ‘first point’ at which our ‘eonic observer’ can start to see the eonic effect, and also because its symbolic significance forces the issue of ideology. This division is of course a consequence, slightly artificial, of our model, and can’t safely be used for any ideological purpose, although it shows clearly that liberalism is a main core emergent, while the Marxist challenge is a bit too late to alter the momentum of the system, as the Bolshevik fiasco makes clear. But nothing in our model forbids a general TP4 exception just here second-guessing a liberal outcome with an alternate as socialism (i.e. democracy!). Unfortunately the result is likely to start a jackknife sequence. The point is not complicated: a democratic realization leads naturally to a consideration of socialism, but, as it happens, this natural flow is interrupted by the timing of the eonic sequence, as macro switches to micro-action, seemingly causing a division of the two aspects, due to the downshift to low octane. This gesture required someone really smart, such as Marx, perhaps not smart enough. We see the dilemma in the attempt to abandon the rich emergentism of the modern transition for a precipitous TP4 exception. So where’s the socialist Mozart? Nature was done just as socialism got underway. This creates an illusion of legitimation of the first liberal experiments. If the point is not clear consider that it took the American Civil War to set a course correction for the first and greatest liberal experiment, the American democratic breakthrough.

This choice of symbolic year is about the same as Hegel’s 1806, but more cogently directed to the issues, and merely a useful token for a rough ending to the transition. It is like the difference between ignition, liftoff and steady flight getting underway. But is it also the end of the eonic sequence? We don’t know. But it is an unsettling thought, since ‘revolutions as free action’ will move to take the place of transitional sequence.

Armed with the distinction of macro and micro-action we can see at a glance the overall dynamic at work, however we understand it, and it is unsettling. We think in terms of linear progress, and then are understandably baffled by the First World War, the Holocaust. Whatever else is the case, these are well outside the eonic sequence. These are clear cases where mideonic stupidity is starting up again. Nietzsche influenced by Darwin does not bode well for the future.

Can we even maintain the modern transition, let alone advance it? In fact, we can, but we see in antiquity this dread effect as the classical transitions run out of octane fuel and lapse to a higher degree of mechanization, never to recover. That is less likely in this case, although we see the fall-off take effect as the transitional effect wanes. This is not Spenglerian decline but a one-time slump-down from a bursting episode of high performance, followed by a more stable process tending to a more contingent social drift, and then potentially, we can hope, new advance, but without eonic determination, a new freedom beyond the eonic sequence. This is the punctuation, then equilibrium, of the whole eonic effect. But it is not really equilibrium, and the metaphor is not quite right. A whole series of take-offs have been ignited, and it is completely within the rules of the game to realize the dynamic and compensate. The fate of the Hellenistic need not be ours.

Although our model seems to be confounded by an ideological modernism or a Eurocentric focus now under challenge, we see that in fact it has a built-in device to reconcile these contradictions, and we leave our system just as it undergoes its convulsive reversal from local transition to global oikoumene creation. It is important to remember that in our model, the local and long-range future diverge, and no teleological claim on the latter is possible for the former. And our system aggressively reminds us of this as the sequence seems to stop in the wake of the revolutionary early modern. This explains the baffling puzzle arising in the instant bifurcation of our system at the very moment it is getting under way. And one issue is the teleological antinomy, latent in Kant’s Challenge, of the potential system and actual outcome, with its economic emergentism taken as the ‘final state of the system’. Chillingly apt that Marx (not alone!) proposes the abstract category ‘socialism’, which he refuses to define, as a next ‘transition’. This thinking merely reflects the antinomy, and it is important to remember that our model predicts nothing. It is right that it be that way and we can see that Marxism suffered the fiasco of a ‘local time teleological’ projection. Marx/Engels as champions of democracy works quite nicely.

Econostream != eonic sequence We don’t need to indulge in leftist propaganda to see that our model distinguishes two things: the economic stream and the eonic sequence diverge. If someone says that you must submit to economic ‘laws’ in the name of history, laws that make him rich and others poor, that man is pulling the wool over your ideas with bogus theory, because we can see that economic processes pertain only to economies and don’t generate the long-range future (at least so far, looking backward), these points not to be taken dogmatically. Our model simply mirrors the debate, its proper task.

How elegant yet somber to observe this system cross this divide into a new era in rise of liberalism, the turbulence of revolution, and the passage across the spectrum of the Left to the year 1848, about when our transition moves toward shutdown in the open field of a ‘new age’. Although a basic liberal interpretation is well within the bounds of our model, a kind of default outcome, we should note that this construct cannot be safely used as a form of legitimation for that.

It is not hard to show that emergent liberalism was an imperfect outcome of the modern transition. The American system failed even to abolish slavery, proof that nothing deductive can be extracted from ‘eonic determination’, in case propagandists aim at a legitimation of modernism via this model. The sudden chaotification resembles overshoot and undershoot in a control system, and the instability or equivocation is evident from the first in the twin figures of Luther an Münzer, then in Locke and the Levellers. As if a last minute course correction, suddenly turning into a demand for a different outcome, finds Marx and Engels challenging the whole transition as it were, on the verge of a disastrous attempt at course correction. Lest we forget, they took action at a desperate moment in a system that almost failed to accomplish abolition. We are left with an unnerving question, What else is missing?

An immense ideological veil protects the confusion of eonic sequence versus econostream. The modern transition rapidly crystallized into the capitalist societies dominated by market ideology that are prone to the domination of a new type of elite. We can’t quite mediate that using our model, and the potential of this system so far outstrips systems of antiquity that leftist reactions tend to backfire. The world of our transition is nearly done before the Industrial Revolution, which rapidly generates a secondary post-transitional culture of the new capitalist society. Looking at the chaotic movements of world history we should think this development potentially almost benign by comparison, and the classic Marxist critiques, while altogether cogent and seminal, tended to misdiagnosis and false efforts to construct an undefined socialism whose record speaks for itself. We cannot legislate these issues with our model, which promptly reflects this dilemma without resolving it. We see the obvious lost opportunity: the founders of the American system could have created a socialist republic, but were too fixated on Roman history.

However, the whole point of our model is that it allows us to distinguish two levels, e.g. emergent democracy at its initialization, however obscure, and the subsequent realization, which may be flawed or fail. In a global context the dilemma of empire arises very quickly and we find the sad reaction to the American system rising to produce a challenge to its future. The rich potential of the eonic starting point is soon forgotten in the mix of Darwinism, classical liberalism, economic ideology and scientism that assembles the new worldview. Locked in this box we fail to see the limits to our vision this induces. Challenged at once by the far left, the new economic society ambiguously enters its mideonic pilgrimage in experiments still young in the reckoning of five thousand years. The future of the reign of Capital is an ominous suspense.

The new world of capitalism must be judged on its own terms, our job done. We have merely disengaged it from the macrosequence. But we must note that before classical liberalism stands the work of its creators, who never foresaw the results of their endorsement of economic freedom, that orphan of the discrete freedom sequence. The eonic mainline can’t control the economic field, as core and periphery imbalance arises. But the difference between the two can be seen in the way the modern transformation lets loose a new round of slavery in the periphery, while the core, racing against time, generates abolition, and not a moment too soon. The American sidewinder system doesn’t make it, and we have the preposterous constitution of four-fifths person at the outcome. Downfield course corrections beyond the divide point prove very costly, and are prone to fall into the hands of those who don’t know what they are doing. In the post-divide the gates of the penitentiary slam closed, and the inmates begin to make their own rules.

Like a great oak tree the eonic sequence sprouts a new limb and this injects new life into the world system, even as the other limbs continue in their growth and separate existence, forced however to mediate the immense confusions of globalization. Needless to say we must evaluate dialectically the nature of the modern outcome by sifting the eonic emergents defining our transition. There is no simple talisman or formula of success. Some more complex process has differentiated into a scattershot spectrum of results and we are inside that field of eonic emergents, assessing their components as relative free action. We must beware of getting lost in fantasies of a ‘Western Civilization’, although that confusion will prove inevitable, at great cost to the slowing of globalization momentum.

The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution
by Karl Marx
Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 169
Translated by the Marx-Engels Institute
Transcribed for the Internet by director@marx.org, 1994
Cologne, December 11. When the March flood — a flood in miniature — subsided it left on the surface of Berlin no prodigies, no revolutionary giants, but traditional creatures, thickset bourgeois figures-the liberals of the United Provincial Diet, the representatives of the conscious Prussian bourgeoisie. The main contingents for the new ministries were supplied by the Rhineland and Silesia, the provinces with the most advanced bourgeoisie. They were followed by a whole train of Rhenish lawyers. As the bourgeoisie was pushed into the background by the feudal aristocracy, the Rhineland and Silesia were replaced in the cabinets by the old Prussian provinces. The only link of the Brandenburg cabinet with the Rhineland is through a single Elberfeld Tory. Hansemann and von der Heydt! These two names exemplify the whole difference between March and December 1848 for the Prussian bourgeoisie.

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